Israeli Politics and Middle East Peacemaking

Avi Shlaim

Journal of Palestine Studies, 24:4, Summer 1995, pp. 21-31

Israel, Henry Kissinger once remarked, has no foreign policy,
only domestic politics. Although this remark involves an obvious
over-simplification, it raises an interesting question about the
relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy in Israel.
Domestic politics influence foreign policy in all countries, of course.
In the case of Israel, however, the impact of domestic politics on
foreign policy is particularly profound because foreign policy involves
existential questions and questions of national identity which weigh
much more heavily on the mind of the Israeli public than on that of
most other countries.
The relationship between domestic politics and
foreign policy is not a one-way street. Just as internal political
forces influence foreign policy decisions, developments in the sphere
of external relations feed into the domestic political scene in a
never-ending process. The purpose of this article is to examine the
interplay between domestic politics and Middle East peace-making since
the June 1992 elections at which the Labour Party regained power after
fifteen years of dominance by the right-wing Likud bloc. The main focus
of the article is on the eventful year which began with the signature
of the Israel-PLO accord on 13 September 1993 and ended with the
signature of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan on 26 October
1994.
There is a broad consensus in Israel, encompassing
both the Likud and the Labour parties, which places national security
above peace with the country's Arab neighbours. This consensus
militates against making concessions for the sake of peace that are
liable to undermine Israel's security. No similar consensus,
however,exists regarding peace agreements that do not appear to detract
from Israel's security. To be more precise, there is no consensus on
whether or not Israel should be prepared to trade the territories it
captured in June 1967 for peace with her neighbours.
Here lies the most fundamental difference between
the foreign policy outlook of the Likud and that of the Labour Party.
Likud is committed to the ideology of Greater Israel which claims the
West Bank - Judea and Samaria in its terminology - as an integral and
inalienable part of the Land of Israel. Labour is a pragmatic party
which places security above all other values. For Likud, the Land of
Israel is sacred; for Labour Israel's security is sacred. Likud's
approach to the occupied territories is governed primarily by
ideological imperatives; Labour's approach is governed primarily by
security considerations. To say this is not to suggest that Likud is
indifferent to security or that Labour is untouched by the ideal of
Greater Israel but simply to point to the different emphases that
colour the world view of these two parties.
On the Palestinian question, until very recently,
there has been a curious convergence between Likud and Labour. Both
parties have suffered from a general Israeli blind spot when it came to
the Palestinians. Both parties have been extremely slow to come to
terms with the reality of Palestinian nationalism. Both parties, when
in power, displayed a distinct preference for dealing with the rulers
of Arab states rather than the representatives of the Palestinian
people. Both parties were vehemently opposed to negotiations with the
PLO and both remain opposed to the establishment of an independent
Palestinian state.
The Labour Party advocated territorial compromise
over the West Bank after 1967 but what it had in mind was compromise
with King Hussein of Jordan, not with the Palestinians. The infamous
statement that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people came not
from the Likud but from Labour's Golda Meir. Yitzhak Rabin, who
succeeded Mrs Meir as prime minister after the October War, stood
before a joint session of Congress in 1976 and declared that Israel
would not commit suicide by meeting with the PLO. He insisted that the
Palestinians were not the core of the conflict and that to consider
them as such was `to put the cart before the horse'.
This solid national consensus began to crack after
the Middle East peace conference convened in Madrid in October 1991.
Israel's position in the post-Madrid peace talks featured prominently
in the general elections campaign of June 1992. Yitzhak Shamir
represented the Likud's traditional line of refusing to bow to external
pressure, of defending the integrity of the Land of Israel and of
supporting an ever-growing number of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories. Yitzhak Rabin represented the Labour Party's traditional
line of territorial compromise, of trading land for peace, provided it
did not jeopardize Israel's security. He favoured a freeze on
settlement activity and promised a considerably more positive attitude
towards the peace talks than that of his political rivals, with
priority to reaching an agreement on Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank.
The verdict of the electorate was unusually
clear-cut: it rejected the territorial expansionism of the Likud and
opted for the territorial compromise advocated by the Labour Party.
Likud's representation in the 120-member Knesset fell from 40 to 32,
while that of the Labour Party increased from 39 to 44. At long last,
after fifteen years either in opposition or in a frustrating
power-sharing coalition with the Likud, the Labour Party won a clear
popular mandate to implement its own foreign policy programme.
Since the Labour Party did not win an absolute
majority, it had to find coalition partners from among the smaller
parties to give the government it formed a majority in the Knesset.
Coalition building is never a simple matter in Israel where the
proportional representation system encourages a multitude of parties.
But the principle that guided Yitzhak Rabin, a principle first
formulated by David Ben-Gurion, was to reserve foreign affairs and
security for his own party and to offer coalition partners some of the
less important ministries. Meretz, a left-of-centre party which won
twelve seats and Shas, a moderate religious party composed mainly of
Oriental Jews which won six seats, signed on as junior partners in the
Labour-led coalition, giving the new government a narrow majority of 62
Members of the Knesset.
Yitzhak Rabin doubled up as prime minister and
minister of defence in the new government. He appointed his old rival,
Shimon Peres, as foreign minister but he did so on the clear
understanding that he himself would be in overall charge of the
country's foreign policy. The division of labour between the two men
was that the prime minister would direct all the bilateral peace talks
while the foreign minister would direct the much less important
multilateral talks. Thus, from the very start, Rabin enjoyed a position
of towering dominance in the making of his government's foreign and
defence policy.
Despite this dominant position, from the very
beginning there was a certain duality in the making of Israeli foreign
policy under the new management. This duality stemmed from the
different outlooks, preferences and time-frames of the prime minister
and the foreign minister. A professional soldier turned politician,
Rabin tends to approach diplomacy as the extension of war by other
means. His aim is to divide and rule his Arab opponents in order to
reassert the strategic dominance that Israel enjoyed in the Middle East
prior to the 1991 Gulf War. Consequently, rather than strive towards a
comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Rabin is a great
believer in one peace at a time. The idea behind this approach is to
break the united Arab front, to deal with each party separately and to
pay the lowest possible price in terms of territory in return for each
bilateral agreement. Rabin has no empathy whatsoever for the Arabs, no
understanding of economics and no vision of a new Middle East.
If Yitzhak Rabin is the politician concerned with
short-term advantage, Shimon Peres is the statesman intent on changing
the course of history. Peres has much more empathy for the Arabs, a
better understanding of economics, a clearer appreciation of the
declining utility of military force in the modern world, and a vision
of a new Middle East. His vision, articulated in his 1993 book A New
Middle East, is inspired by the example of the European Union. A prior
condition for the realization of this vision is a comprehensive
settlement of the Arab-Israeli problem. Security, to Peres's way of
thinking, is measured not just in military terms, but also in
psychological, political and economic terms. In his view it would be a
mistake for Israel to try to perpetuate the territorial status quo and
to continue to base her national security on massive and costly armed
forces. The alternative he believes in is Israeli withdrawal from the
occupied territories, a resolution of the conflict with the Arabs, and
open borders which would enable Israel to extend its economic links
throughout the region, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.
The change of government in Israel did not produce a
dramatic change in Israel's position in the bilateral peace talks which
resumed in Washington. True to his election promises and tactical
preference for one peace at a time, Rabin began by giving priority to
the Palestinian track. But the stalemate in this track persisted
because Rabin's offer of autonomy to the Palestinians did not go
significantly beyond that of his predecessor. When it became clear that
the Palestinian delegation was not prepared to accept his terms, Rabin
switched his attention to Syria. His statement that in return for real
peace Israel would be prepared to pay by territorial withdrawal on the
Golan Heights broke the ice in the Israeli-Syrian track. The Syrians
responded by saying that they were ready for total peace with Israel
but only in return for total withdrawal. But when Rabin made it clear
that total withdrawal is out of the question,the negotiators were back
to square one. The year 1993 thus ended with very little sign of
progress in any of the tracks of the bilateral talks.
In January 1994, while the official negotiations
continued to mark time, secret talks began in Oslo between two Israeli
academics and representatives of the PLO. The academics were soon
joined by two senior officials from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, gave unstinting support and
encouragement to the Israeli team. Peres informed Rabin about these
talks but Rabin was rather sceptical at first. He did not give the
final go-ahead until after it became evident that the marginalized and
demoralized PLO leadership in Tunis would settle for considerably less
than the official Palestinian delegation in Washington. The upshot was
the agreement between Israel and the PLO, which took the entire world
by surprise, on interim Palestinian self-government in the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank town of Jericho. Rabin gave his blessing to this
agreement but all the heavy lifting on the Israeli side had been done
by his foreign minister. Without Rabin's blessing, the Oslo accord
would have remained a dead letter; without Peres's heavy lifting there
would have probably been no accord at all.
The Declaration of Principles on Interim
Self-Government Arrangements signed by Israel and the PLO in Washington
on 13 September 1993 represents a major watershed in Israeli politics.
In the first place, the DOP was preceded by mutual recognition between
Israel and the PLO - an abrupt departure from the long-standing
bipartisan stand of denouncing the PLO as a terrorist organization and
refusing to talk to it. Second, the DOP was the first ever formal
agreement between Israel and the Palestinians -a departure from the
bipartisan preference for negotiating with the governments of the Arab
states and bypassing the Palestinians. Third, in the DOP Israel
recognised for the first time that the Palestinian people have national
rights - a departure from the bipartisan insistence that the
Palestinian problem is essentially a refugee problem.
To be sure, the DOP fell a long way short of the
Palestinian claim to full independence and statehood. As its title
makes clear, the DOP only provided for interim Palestinian
self-government arrangements in Gaza and Jericho. Moreover, the
document signed in Washington was not a full-blown agreement but a
declaration of principles accompanied by a detailed timetable for
negotiations between Israel and the PLO. This timetable allowed two
months for reaching an agreement on the withdrawal of Israeli forces
from Gaza and Jericho; four months for the completion of the Israeli
withdrawal and the transfer of limited powers to a Palestinian
authority; nine months for the holding of elections for a Palestinian
Council; and a five-year transitional period leading to a permanent
settlement based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
The shape of the final settlement is not spelled out
in the DOP. All the options, including a perpetuation of the interim
arrangements, an independent Palestinian state and a confederation
between a Palestinian entity and Jordan, are left open. Similarly, all
the most contentious and sensitive issues in Israeli-Palestinian
relations are left in abeyance for the negotiations on the final status
of the territories that are due to begin not later than the third year
of the transitional period. These issues include the future of
Jerusalem, the status of the Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories, the rights of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, and the
borders of the Palestinian entity.
The ambiguities and contradictions that pervade the
DOP are best illustrated by the status of the Jewish settlements. Under
the terms of the DOP the Israeli government is committed to the
principle of Palestinian self-government not only in Gaza and Jericho
but throughout the West Bank, but excluding Jerusalem. While
negotiations over the borders between Israel and the self-governing
Palestinian area are deferred to a later stage, the mention of borders
is in itself significant. It implies a commitment by the Israeli
government to a territorial settlement with the Palestinians. But at
the same time, for security and domestic political reasons,the Israeli
government insisted that at least for the transitional period of five
years, the settlements must remain exactly where they are, under its
own jurisdiction and under the protection of the Israeli army.
The settlements have been repeatedly denounced by
the international community as illegal and as an obstacle to peace.
Inside Israel, however, the settlements remain a very delicate and
difficult issue. In numerical terms, the settlers amount to roughly
10,000 on the Golan Heights, 5,000 in the Gaza Strip, and 120,000 on
the West Bank, not counting the greater Jerusalem area. But although
they form a tiny minority of the Israeli public, the settlers are a
militant, vociferous and highly organised minority whose spearhead is
Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful. Possibly as many as eighty or
eighty-five per cent of the settlers were attracted to the occupied
territories by material incentives like cheap housing and a better
quality of life rather than by an ideological commitment to rebuild the
Land of Israel. But that still leaves a hard core of ultra-nationalist
settlers who are uncompromisingly opposed to any territorial compromise
with the Arabs and who have at their disposal a highly effective
settlement lobby. It is true that the political clout of the settlement
lobby has diminished in the wake of Likud's fall from power but
it is still a force to be reckoned with in Israeli politics.
The Labour government which came to power in the
summer of 1992 is sometimes portrayed as the unfortunate heir to
fifteen years of frenetic settlement activity by its Likud
predecessors. But the reality is more complicated. Both Labour and
Likud governments built settlements on the West Bank after it was
captured from Jordan in 1967 but they did so for somewhat different
reasons. While Labour's approach to settlements was governed primarily
by security considerations, that of the Likud was governed primarily by
ideological considerations. Labour, in line with the Allon Plan,
favoured the building of settlements in areas considered crucial to
Israel security (about 30 per cent of the West Bank) and the return of
the heavily populated areas to Jordanian rule. Likud governments, on
the other hand, were opposed to any territorial withdrawal on the West
Bank, whether in favour of Jordan or in favour of the Palestinians.
They therefore planted settlements across the length and breadth of the
West Bank, including the heavily populated areas, in order to ensure
permanent Israeli control and to foreclose the option of territorial
withdrawal in the event of a Labour return to power. The Rabin
government is thus impaled on the horns of a dilemma: it has embarked
on the quest for a territorial settlement with the Palestinians but it
is also committed, at least in the interim period, to maintain the
Jewish settlements which its domestic political opponents had
deliberately erected as a obstacle on the road to a settlement.
The fact that the Gaza-Jericho deal did not involve
the immediate dismantling of settlements made it easier to sell to the
Israeli public. But support for the accord was far from unanimous.
Likud leaders, and the leaders of the smaller parties further to the
right such as Tsomet and Moledet, denounced the deal as a sell-out of
Israel's patrimony, as a betrayal of the settlers, as the beginning of
the end of the Land of Israel and as the thin end of the wedge of an
independent Palestinian state. These leaders greatly exaggerated the
significance of the concessions that the Israeli government had made to
secure this deal while ignoring the concessions that the Palestinians
had to make.
These sweeping denunciations and prophecies of gloom
and doom did not cut much ice with the Israeli public. The great
majority of Israelis responded to the deal which their government had
struck through the Oslo channel in a much more balanced and mature
fashion than the politicians of the right. A Gallup poll conducted for
CNN television showed that 65 per cent of those polled approved of the
accord with only 13 per cent describing themselves as `very much
against'. More than 50 per cent of those polled believed a Palestinian
state would come into existence alongside Israel within twenty years.
These figures suggest that the majority of Israelis were less troubled
by the prospect of Palestinian statehood than the politicians of the
right.
On 23 September 1993, at the end of a debate which
lasted three days, the Knesset endorsed the government's peace
strategy, voting by 61 to 50 in favour of the accord with the PLO.
Right-wing MKs hurled insults at the prime minister and his colleagues
while several thousand protesters, many of them settlers from the West
Bank and Gaza, staged demonstrations outside the Knesset building.
During the debate the opposition appeared to be much more divided than
the government. Benyamin Netanyahu, who had succeeded Yitzhak Shamir as
the leader of the Likud in the aftermath of its electoral defeat, was
unable to enforce party discipline. Nor did he have any coherent
alternative to offer to the government's cautious peace strategy. The
margin of victory exceeded Rabin's expectations and provided him with a
significant boost in the face of opposition demands for a national
referendum or new elections. He was particularly pleased that a
majority of the Jewish MKs from all parties voted for his peace
initiative so he did not have to rely on the support of the Arab MKs
which was naturally forthcoming.
Having secured parliamentary ratification for the
accord it struck with the PLO, the government moved to the next stage
of implementing the accord. At this stage, however, the lack of
consensus within the government became increasingly apparent.
Government leaders were divided into two groups. One group wanted to
spin out the negotiations with the PLO with a view to maintaining
Israeli control over as much of the West Bank as possible for as long
as possible and blocking any real progress towards Palestinian
statehood. The other group accepted that the accord meant Israeli
withdrawal from most of the West Bank and, in the longer run, an
independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. The first
group wanted to use the transitional period of five years to perpetuate
as far as possible the political and territorial status quo; the second
group wanted to use the transitional period to develop a different type
of relationship with the Palestinians. It is widely suspected that
Yitzhak Rabin belongs to the first group although he himself denies it.
On the other hand, no one doubts that Shimon Peres and his deputy
belong to the second group and they themselves make little effort to
conceal it.
Two committees were set up in early October 1993 to
negotiate the implementation of the lofty-sounding declaration signed
in Washington. The first committee was chaired by Shimon Peres and
Mahmoud Abbas, the leader who signed the declaration on behalf of the
PLO. This ministerial-level committee was supposed to meet in Cairo
every two or three weeks. The other committee, the nuts and bolts
committee, consisted of experts who were supposed to meet for two or
three days each week in the Egyptian resort of Taba on the Red Sea. The
heads of the delegations to these talks were Nabil Shaath and
Major-General Amnon Shahak, the number two man in IDF and head of its
military intelligence. The two sides managed to hammer out an agenda
and formed two groups of experts, one to deal with military affairs,
the other with the transfer of authority.
Fluctuations in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
were directly linked to the unresolved rivalry between Rabin and Peres
and to the involvement of senior IDF officers in this rivalry. These
officers had been kept completely in the dark about the secret talks in
the Norwegian capital and they felt bitter at not having been consulted
about the security implications of the accord. Chief of Staff Ehud
Barak believed that in their haste to secure their place in history,the
politicians had conceded too much to the PLO and that when the time
came to implement the agreement it was the responsibility of the army
to tackle the security problems. Rabin's decision to put army generals
in charge of the detailed negotiations with the PLO was due partly to
his desire to mollify the generals for their earlier exclusion and
partly to his desire to limit Peres's latitude for making further
concessions. But, as some of Rabin's own party colleagues pointed out
at the time, his heavy reliance on the generals created an unhealthy
precedent for the intervention of the military in matters of high
policy.
Underlying the labyrinthine negotiations at Taba,
there was a basic conceptual divide. The Israeli representatives wanted
a gradual and strictly limited transfer of powers while maintaining
overall responsibility for security in the occupied territories in
their own hands. They wanted to repackage rather than end Israel's
military occupation. The Palestinians wanted an early and extensive
transfer of power to enable them to start laying the foundations for an
independent state. They were anxious to get rid of the Israeli
occupation and they struggled to gain every possible symbol of
sovereignty.
As a result of this basic conceptual divide the Taba
negotiations plunged repeatedly into crisis and took considerably
longer to complete than the two months allowed for in the original
timetable. Another complicating factor was the tension between the army
officers and the foreign minister. The generals directed some of their
fire at Shimon Peres for his apparent willingness to concede ground on
vital security issues, such as full Israeli control of border crossings
and access roads to settlements in the occupied territories. Ever the
grand visionary, Peres mocked the generals for their obsession with
minute details. When the negotiations got stuck, it was usually Peres,
the consummate diplomat, who worked out the saving formula directly
with Yasir Arafat.
After four months of wrangling, an agreement was
reached in the form of two documents,one on general principles, the
other on border crossings. The two documents were initialled by Shimon
peres and Yasir Arafat in Cairo on 9 February 1994. Although the Cairo
agreement was tactfully presented as a compromise solution, it was a
compromise that tilted very heavily towards the Israeli position. IDF
had managed to impose its own conception of the interim period:
specific steps to transfer limited powers to the Palestinians without
giving up Israel's overall responsibility for security. IDF undertook
to redeploy rather than withdraw its forces in the Gaza Strip and
Jericho. The Cairo agreement gave IDF `full authority' over Gaza's
three settlement blocs, the four lateral roads joining them to the
Green Line and `the relevant territory overlooking them'. The
outstanding feature of the agreement was thus to allow IDF to maintain
a military presence in and around the area earmarked for Palestinian
self-government and to retain full responsibility for external security
and control of the land crossings to Egypt and Jordan. Despite these
serious limitations, the Cairo agreement did form a first step in
regulating the withdrawal of the Israeli Civil Administration and
secret services from Gaza to Jericho.
This process of withdrawal was rudely shaken on 25
February 1994 when Dr Baruch Goldstein, an American-born settler and
member of the racist party Kach, opened fire with an IDF-issued Galil
assault rifle on Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in
Hebron, killing 29 before being bludgeoned to death by the survivors. A
preliminary report by a commission of inquiry appointed by the
government revealed monumental incompetence and systematic failure to
enforce the law against armed Jewish settlers on the part of the
Israeli security forces. But the Hebron massacre also revealed that the
Israeli concept of security in the occupied territories was basically
flawed because it catered only for Jews while ignoring the needs of the
Palestinian inhabitants. Israeli settlers had the army, the police and
the border police to protect them as well as being heavily armed
themselves. The Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories, on
the other hand, were left to the tender mercies of the settlers and the
Israeli security services.
The PLO angrily suspended its participation in the
peace talks in response to the massacre, demanding the removal of the
400 or so militant settlers from Hebron and the disarming of the rest.
Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement which was bitterly opposed to
the peace talks with the Jewish state from the start, vowed to exact
revenge. Sympathy for the settlers sharply declined inside Israel after
the massacre both because of their attempts to derail the peace process
and because they threatened to embroil their own countrymen in a
vicious circle of violence and bloodshed.
The Israeli government did not go as far as it could
have done in cracking down on the militant settlers. What it did do was
outlaw Kach and detain without trial some of its leaders. It also
acceded to the PLO's demand for a temporary international presence in
Hebron to assist in promoting stability and restoring normal life in
the city. Calls from the PLO and other quarters to put the whole
question of settlements on the table were rejected by the government on
the grounds that it was not obliged to do so by the original accord
until the beginning of the third year of the transitional period. The
government did promise however, in a joint communiquי it issued with
the PLO in Cairo on 31 March, to accelerate its withdrawal from Gaza
and Jericho and to be guided by the target dates set in the DOP.
These concessions were just enough to induce the PLO
to resume its participation in the peace talks and another round of
negotiations resulted in an agreement which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin
and Yasir Arafat in Cairo on 4 May. The Cairo agreement wrapped up the
Gaza-Jericho negotiations and set the terms for expanding Palestinian
self-government to the rest of the West Bank. Expansion was to take
place in three stages. First, responsibility for tourism, education and
culture, health,social welfare and direct taxation was to be
transferred from Israel's Civil Administration to the Palestinian
National Authority. Second, Israel was to redeploy its armed forces
away from `Palestinian population centres'. Third, elections were due
to take place throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a new
authority.
The Cairo document was billed by both sides as an
agreement to divorce after 27 years of unhappy co-existence in which
the stronger partner forced the weaker to live under its yoke. This was
true in the sense that Israel secured a separate legal system, water,
electricity and roads for the Jewish settlements. It was not true in
the sense that the document gave the stronger party firm control over
the new relationship.
The Cairo document stresses repeatedly the need for
co-operation, co-ordination and harmonization in the new relationship.
A large number of liaison committees, most of which were to be divided
equally between the two sides, gave a superficial appearance of parity.
But a closer scrutiny of the agreement reveals that this parity is
undermined in favour of the stronger partner by the fact that Israeli
occupation laws and military orders were to remain in force unless
amended or abrogated by mutual agreement. What this meant in practice
was that any issue that could not be resolved by negotiation would be
subject to the provisions of Israeli law rather than that of
international law. This was a retreat from the Palestinian demand that
international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, should be
the source of legislation and jurisdiction during the transitional
period.
A week after the Cairo document was signed, a token
force of 30 Palestinian policemen entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt to
take over control for internal security from the retreating Israelis.
This was the first tangible evidence that Israeli occupation was
winding down. Until this point all the movement had been unilateral as
the Israeli army redeployed its forces so as to provide continuing
protection to the tiny community of Jewish settlers in the strip. Now a
new Palestinian police force was to take charge of the nearby
Palestinian population centres in accordance with a pre-arranged
division of labour. The Israeli withdrawal was greeted with a sigh of
relief at home and great joy and jubilation among the Gazans. As the
last Israeli soldiers pulled out of their military camps in Rafah and
Nusairat to a final barrage of stones, the Israeli flag was replaced by
the flag of Palestine. A 27-year old experiment in imposing Israeli
rule over a million and a half recalcitrant Arabs, an experiment doomed
to failure from the start, was visibly and symbolically nearing the end
of its life.
The government's policy of controlled withdrawal
from Gaza and Jericho enjoyed broad popular support. Hard as they
tried,the leaders of the opposition failed to arouse the nation against
the decisions of the government. As far as the government is concerned,
the real paradox is that it needs a strong PLO to implement the
Gaza-Jericho settlement, but a strong PLO only reinforces the
determination of the Palestinians to fight for a state of their own.
The Israeli prime minister has not mastered the art of gracious giving;
the PLO chairman can be every bit as ungracious, and undignified, in
fighting over every issue, however small, to extract the last possible
concession.
Yasir Arafat's long-awaited arrival in Gaza on 1
July showed how much horror and revulsion he continues to evoke among
Israelis even after his historic handshake with their prime minister.
Arafat's visit thus marked a moment of truth in Israel's domestic
politics. Likud leaders saw the visit as an occasion for a mighty show
of strength, joining hands with the leaders of the far-right Tsomet and
Moledet parties. Their anti-Arafat rhetoric reached hysterical levels.
But a rally organized by `the national camp' in Jerusalem's Zion Square
turned into a rampage by some 10,000 right-wing rowdies against Arab
bystanders and property in the Old City. The ensuring orgy of violence
did nothing to endear the hard-liners to the Israeli public. Far from
arousing the nation against the policy of the government, the rally
back-fired against its own organisers, providing ministers with a
welcome opportunity to denounce right-wing extremism.
The Labour government further enhanced its standing
at home by concluding an agreement with Jordan. Israel and Jordan had
always been the best of enemies, and many secret high-level meetings
had taken place over the years across the battle lines. Palestinian
nationalism posed a threat to both Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan and they therefore perceived a common interest in containing it.
After 1967 the Labour Party remained committed to the survival of the
Hashemite monarchy in Amman and emerged as the main proponent of the
so-called Jordanian option. The Israel-PLO accord took King Hussein by
complete surprise and seemed to signal the end of the special
relationship between his country and Israel. But at a secret meeting
with the King two weeks after the accord was signed, Mr Rabin assured
him that Israel remained committed to the survival of his regime and
that Jordan's interests would be taken into account in all subsequent
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
A dramatic breakthrough occurred on 25 July 1994
when Yitzhak Rabin met King Hussein in the White House in Washington
and, in the presence of a beaming President Clinton, signed a
declaration which formally ended the 46-year state of war between
Israel and Jordan. Rabin claimed for himself all the credit for the
Washington Declaration which he described as `the closest thing to a
peace treaty'. With characteristic lack of grace, he told Israeli
journalists that his foreign minister had nothing to do with the sudden
about-turn in the relations with Jordan.
Yet in truth Shimon Peres had been the real
architect of the Washington Declaration, just as he had been the real
architect of the Oslo accord and of the Cairo agreement. Peres is
renowned for his pro-Hussein views and in the Labour Party he is often
nicknamed `the last Hashemite'. Peres's most famous encounter with King
Hussein took place in London in 1987. The London Agreement provided for
bilateral negotiations under international auspices but the then prime
minister Yitzhak Shamir scuppered it by insisting, as was his wont, on
unconditional surrender by the enemy. After the Labour victory in 1992,
when Rabin refused to talk to the PLO and pinned his hopes on Syria, it
was Peres who argued that without a settlement with the Palestinians
the King was unlikely to come out of the closet and that the key to a
settlement with both was economic co-operation. On 2 November 1993,
Peres paid a secret visit to His Royal Highness to whom he once
referred as His Royal Shyness, in Amman and the two of them worked out
a joint strategy for peace in stages which included persuading the
Clinton administration to write off Jordan's debt to America. It was
this strategy which paved the way to the trilateral summit in
Washington.

The
accord with Jordan was overwhelmingly popular right across the Israeli
political spectrum. An opinion poll which coincided with the Washington
summit found that 61 per cent of Israelis believe in `the vision of the
new Middle East'. So enthusiastic and unanimous was the popular
response that even the Likud was forced to change its tune. In the past
Likud leaders, led by Ariel Sharon, touted the slogan `Jordan is
Palestine' which implied the destruction of the Hashemite regime on the
East Bank and its replacement by a Palestinian state. This had been the
Israeli right's favourite solution to the Palestinian problem. Whether
he liked it or not, Benyamin Netanyahu was forced to recognize that
this solution had been overtaken by events, and he even praised the
accord with Jordan. Netanyahu also told Crown Prince Hassan that
Sharon's view that Jordan is Palestine is not shared by him personally
or by his party.

The
accord with Jordan not only heightened public approval of Rabin's
policy but also enhanced his bargaining position vis-ב-vis the PLO. It
was immediately apparent that Rabin intended to play the Jordanian card
against Arafat, to make him even more submissive and compliant. King
Hussein was the joker in the pack to be kept in reserve for trumping
any aces that Arafat might produce.
The Washington Declaration provided a foretaste of
the way in which the Jordanian card could be played against the
Palestinians. This took the form of a reference to Jordan's `special
role' in caring for the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. East Jerusalem
is claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of the independent state
towards which they are striving. Under the terms of the 13 September
accord, the future of Jerusalem is due to come up for negotiations
between the two sides in the third year of the transitional period. The
reference to Jordan's special role was therefore bound to be seen as a
deliberate ploy by Israel to undercut the Palestinian claim to
Jerusalem. It also introduced a third party to what was supposed to be
a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian affair.
The accord with Jordan could also be seen as
reflecting the measure of Rabin's success in moving away from the
Madrid formula for the conduct of Arab-Israeli peace talks. During the
bilateral talks that followed the Madrid conference, the Arab and
Palestinian delegations tried to maintain a united or at least a
co-ordinated front. This front was broken by the PLO by its solo
diplomacy and separate agreement with Israel. This in turn had the
effect of reducing the inhibitions that other Arab states felt about
doing business with the Jewish state. King Hussein was emboldened to
take the plunge and sign another accord which fell just short of a
peace treaty with Israel.

On 26 October 1994 King Hussein and Mr Rabin went a step further
and signed a formal peace treaty. In Jordan this treaty was regarded as
`the king's peace' but in Israel it enjoyed wide popular support and
elevated Rabin's prestige to a new height. But the conclusion of the
peace treaty with Jordan was followed by a slow-down on the Palestinian
track. There was a distinct hardening of the Israeli position in the
negotiations with the PLO. Labour Party Secretary General Nissim Zvili
openly called for suspending all negotiations for a full two years,
until after the next general elections.

Rabin himself appeared to have lost faith in the Oslo accord. He
refrained from any move that involved a security risk even if it meant
reneging on the Oslo or Cairo agreements. He also came under pressure
from the military and from the settlers to go back on some of Israel's
commitments under these agreements. The military told Rabin that if
they are ordered to withdraw their troops from the centers of
Palestinian population on the West Bank, they would not be able to
guarantee the security of the Jewish settlers. Israel's consequent
refusal to withdraw its troops meant that Palestinian elections could
not take place. This was a violation of the letter of the Oslo accord.

Another example of Rabin's about-turn was the way he handled the
explosive issue of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. In December
1994 settlers from Efrat, south of Bethlehem, started work on a new
housing project on land claimed by the Arab village of Al-Khader. This
action provoked a series of showdowns and clashes between Jews and
Palestinians. The myth of a freeze on settlements on the West Bank was
exposed when the government argued that the freeze on public sector
development never applied to private buildings, nor to projects deemed
necessary for security reasons. By conniving in the expansion of
existing settlements and approving confiscation of more Arab land,
Rabin and his colleagues violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the
Oslo accord.

The most important factor, however, in derailing the talks on
Palestinian self-rule were the suicide bombings inside Israel carried
out by members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the six months between
October 1994 and March 1995 these bombings killed nearly 60 Israelis.
Terror thus became not just a painful nuisance but a strategic threat
of the first order to the peace process. Israeli leaders accuse Yasir
Arafat of not doing enough to prevent terrorist attacks from the areas
under his control. Arafat retorts that these attacks are the inevitable
result of Israel's continued occupation and refusal to hand over to him
full authority. Whatever the causes, the consequences of these attacks
have been two-fold: a serious erosion of Israeli public support for the
peace process with the PLO and an equally serious drop in the level of
public support for the Rabin government.

The record of the Rabin government in the first three years of
its life thus provides another striking illustration of the complexity
of the relationship between domestic politics and Israel's foreign
policy. Rabin's commitment to furthering the peace process in the
Middle East helped him to win the elections of June 1992. His success
in reaching an accord on Palestinian self-rule with the PLO and a peace
treaty with Jordan greatly enhanced his domestic standing. But the wave
of suicide bombings inside Israel raised doubts in the minds of many
Israelis about the competence of their prime minister and about the
wisdom of proceeding further down the track leading to Palestinian
self-rule. Shimon Peres argues that it is more important for their
party to win historically than to win politically, more important, that
is, to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East than to win the
next Israeli elections. Yitzhak Rabin probably cares much more about
winning politically than winning historically. The danger inherent in
Rabin's approach to Middle East peace-making is that he and his party
would lose both politically and historically.